Purdue helps lead way toward digital depositories

9:52 PM,
Feb. 3, 2013

Numerous volumes of the Joint Highway Research Project are shelved Friday in the Engineering Library inside Potter Engineering Center on the campus of Purdue University. A new Purdue program is helping distribute and share technical reports made by faculty and students that until now, was not easily accessible on the Internet. So far, it's been a boon to the dusty, yellowed technical reports written by members of Purdue's Joint Transportation Research.

Written by

Eric Weddle
eweddle@jconline.com

An 8-year-old technical report about geotechnical soil testing has become one of the hottest downloads for Purdue University's open-access digital repository - a system that could become a model for other schools.

The report, co-authored by professor Rodrigo Salgado, compares different methods of testing materials used to build roads. It has racked up 25,000 downloads in the past six years and is one of 1,500 from the campus Joint Transportation Research Program now discoverable worldwide by typing a simple Google search.